Updated: 2026-09-28
On that date the Met Office station at London St James's Park logged 10.2 mm of precipitation — the last time the record shows a winter day reaching that level. This is the honest answer to a question Londoners ask every cold snap, but it comes with an important caveat that we explain below: the archive measures precipitation, not snow depth.
The Met Office MIDAS archive for the London St James's Park station (record running from 1912 to 2024) does not include snow depth measurements. That means there is no number for "centimetres of snow on the ground" for any day in this series. What the record does give us is the most recent winter date on which precipitation reached a significant total — here defined as 10 mm or more in a single day.
That is the closest the archive gets to answering "when was the last heavy snowfall?" for the capital. It is a measure of how much water fell on that day, not how much of it settled as snow. A reader wanting snow depth specifically needs a different dataset; a reader wanting to know when London last had a genuinely notable winter precipitation event has the answer above: 20 January 1999, at 10.2 mm.
London sits at 5 m above sea level at this station, and its winter climate is a big part of the story. The table below is the monthly climate breakdown for London St James's Park across 1912–2024: average daily minimum temperature and average daily precipitation, month by month.
| Month | Average daily minimum temperature (°C) | Average daily precipitation (mm) | Days with minimum temperature data | Days with precipitation data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 2.7 | 1.7 | 1054 | 1053 |
| February | 2.6 | 1.3 | 963 | 963 |
| March | 4.1 | 1.6 | 1054 | 1054 |
| April | 5.7 | 1.6 | 1020 | 1020 |
| May | 9.0 | 1.5 | 1054 | 1054 |
| June | 11.7 | 1.6 | 1020 | 1020 |
| July | 13.8 | 1.6 | 1054 | 1054 |
| August | 13.6 | 1.8 | 1054 | 1054 |
| September | 11.5 | 1.6 | 1020 | 1020 |
| October | 8.7 | 1.9 | 1053 | 1054 |
| November | 5.2 | 1.6 | 1020 | 1020 |
| December | 3.4 | 2.0 | 1054 | 1054 |
The coldest month on the averages is February at 2.6 °C, with January just behind at 2.7 °C. Both sit close enough to freezing that snow is possible within any given cold spell — but the averages never dip below 2.6 °C, which is why London usually gets sleet, a brief dusting or nothing at all, rather than the deep accumulations seen further north and inland.
Daily precipitation averages are modest throughout the year: February is the driest month at 1.3 mm, December the wettest at 2.0 mm. In other words, London is not a particularly wet city day to day, which means a single day reaching 10.2 mm stands out in the record.
Look at the December and January averages above — the two months with the coldest temperatures and the higher precipitation averages of the winter half-year. January 1999's 10.2 mm daily total is far above the January average daily figure of 1.7 mm. That single day delivered more than a typical January day by a wide margin, and it is precisely that kind of intense, concentrated winter precipitation event that produces memorable snow in the capital.
The fact that the most recent qualifying date in this record is from January 1999 is itself the striking detail. For more than a quarter of a century of the series — from that date through to the end of the 1912–2024 record — no later winter day at London St James's Park has reached a 10 mm daily total. The capital has had cold snaps and flurries since, but nothing in this dataset matching that threshold.
Three things follow from the numbers, and they are worth stating plainly:
Snow in London is a marginal-conditions story. Average daily minimum temperatures never fall below 2.6 °C in any month of the year, so the capital sits right at the edge of the snow line. Small shifts in air mass decide whether a winter system arrives as rain, sleet or snow.
Intense winter precipitation is rare, not routine. February's average daily precipitation of 1.3 mm tells you what a normal winter day looks like. The 10.2 mm recorded on 20 January 1999 is an outlier, not a pattern.
The record runs to 2024, but the headline date does not move. Across the complete 1912–2024 window, the last significant winter precipitation day at this station remains 20 January 1999. Anyone planning an event, a trip or simply curious about whether London really gets snow will find the same answer: it happens, but the archive shows you should not count on it.
Met Office — MIDAS archive, station london-st-jamess-park, series 1912–2024. Data provided under the Open Government Licence (OGL v3.0). The archive records precipitation, not snow depth.
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© 2026 HistoClima · data: Met Office (OGL v3.0) · not affiliated with Met Office · citation permitted with source.